Optical transceivers send and receive data in an optical form over an optical link, such as a fiber-optic link. An optical transmitter can include laser driver circuitry to drive a laser or diode, such as a light-emitting diode (LED), to create optical pulses on the fiber-optic link from received electronic signals. An optical receiver can include a photosensitive diode to receive optical signals, which are then converted into electronic signals. Thus, an optical transceiver converts (i) optical signals into analog and/or digital electronic signals, and (ii) electronic signals into optical signals.
In order to determine if the optical transceiver is functioning correctly, various operational parameters are monitored. Flags are then generated to demonstrate the status of the operational parameters. In conventional approaches, the flags are calculated periodically based on a timer, and stored on the optical transceiver in a memory-mapped fashion. In this case, a host processor or circuit board passes a command or address to the transceiver in order to read a flag corresponding to a particular monitored parameter of the transceiver. However, a drawback of this approach is that an unknown amount of time may elapse between a calculation of a given flag and the request to read the flag by the host. As a result, the flag supplied by the optical transceiver to the host may not be up-to-date, thus not reflecting a current status of the associated parameter.